


Climbing Mt. Fuji in July

by OpheliaDusk



Category: Persona 5
Genre: F/M, Sakura Futaba Attends Kosei High School, the rest of the PT makes appearances as well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22793686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpheliaDusk/pseuds/OpheliaDusk
Summary: Futaba takes a step back into the world, and figures out what she wants from it. Yusuke meditates on the abstract concept of sunrise.(Futaba points out that isn't an abstract concept at all, and he says well of course not, if you come at it with that attitude. The resulting argument will probably keep them entertained for weeks.)
Relationships: Kitagawa Yusuke/Sakura Futaba
Comments: 57
Kudos: 261





	1. Monday

**Author's Note:**

> i'm back on my bullshit

“Futaba Sakura, Meguro East Girls’ Middle school. I like video games and computers.”

She scowled at her reflection. Too businesslike. Try again. She cleared her throat and tried her best to channel Ann.

“Hi! I’m Futaba Sakura! I went to Meguro East Girls’ Middle. My d-dad owns a curry shop, so…”

So, what? So come by? Good for business, but bad for her heart. If staring down a faceless mob of classmates at school was hard, she didn’t even want to think about staring them down in her home base. If they would even want to come. If they wouldn’t think she was super lame for giving them an open invitation during class introductions on the first day of school. Besides, if they were anything like her middle school classmates, they’d probably just laugh at her the minute she opened her mouth—

“Bad brain. Bad,” she said sternly, patting herself firmly on her cheeks and locking eyes with herself in the mirror. She should at least get through the first day before deciding everyone hated her. 

She dragged her hands down her face before giving herself one final appraising glance in the mirror. Was the hair too much? Ann always looked Fun And Flirty in her pigtails. As she tugged the left one to sit evenly with the right, Futaba got the nagging suspicion that her own pigtails made her look about eleven years old. She wiggled them a bit lower, so they sat just above her ears. Better? Maybe? 

At least Kosei’s uniform went a long way towards making her look like a functioning human being. Crisp blazer, cute striped bow. Her middle school uniform had been a travesty, a gray plaid jumper skirt that had about as much in common with a stylish anime uniform as a midi ringtone had with a symphony orchestra. It wasn’t that she’d wanted to be fashionable or even particularly cute, it was just that dragging her feet onto the train to school every day might have been a little easier if she had been able to imagine herself as an anime heroine in a sailor collar.

Back then she’d generally been more disdainful than envious of fashionable girls, even more than she’d disdained basically everyone else at school. N3rdz Rul3, or whatever. But it was probably okay to look basically cute as long as you were still a little rebellious. Like Ann. No way her skirt was regulation length. Caught along that train of thought, and buoyed by the knowledge she was alone in her bedroom, Futaba pulled out her phone. She tried popping her hip out the way Ann did, and throwing up a peace sign near her face, and winking at the camera while angling it over her head to catch a photo of her uniform—

“Are you coming, or not?”

Futaba’s shriek could have shattered glass. 

The phone flew out of her hands. She fumbled to catch it, and when that failed, collapsed to the floor and scuttled after it like a demented beetle as it bounced off the carpet. It skittered under her desk and she stuck an arm underneath to grab it, emerging with the phone and an entire colony of dust bunnies before shooting a murderous glance over her shoulder.

Yusuke stood in the doorway of her room, arms folded, a mildly impatient expression on his face. “The boss sent me to collect you. The others are waiting,” he continued, as if the last twenty seconds hadn’t happened. 

Futaba stood up, brushing the dust off of her jacket sleeve. “I’m— I was just— doing my hair!” A hand flew self-consciously up to her pigtails, suddenly embarrassed now that she had an audience larger than the row of stuffed animals on top of her desk. 

Yusuke’s eyes laser-focused on her hair now, as she squirmed. Yusuke in Analysis Mode was a fearful challenger. He always stared with that same narrow, perturbed look, far longer than was comfortable, withholding judgment until he’d examined all angles. Sometimes his expression cleared and he offered satisfied words of praise; sometimes he sighed, as if the object of his scrutiny had personally let him down. In just the last three weeks she’d seen him turn this look on a stuffed fox in a museum (sigh), some new graffiti near the station (praise), and a scalloped, ruffled, pleated fluffy sweater Haru had bought off a designer at Tokyo Fashion Week (confusion, then frustration, then an immediate experiment with several dozen Leblanc napkins that got him kicked out for the evening). Often he— yep, there he goes. He had started pacing around Futaba, staring at her hair from all angles.

“I’m not a bacteria in a petri dish,” she said irritably, crossing her arms. “Fine. I get it! I look weird. It was a stupid idea. I’ll go back to—“

“It’s because your part is uneven,” Yusuke said in reply to a question she hadn’t asked. “I need a comb.”

Startled into complying, Futaba dug under some papers on her desk and handed him a narrow-toothed comb with several teeth missing. Yusuke took it from her and pulled her hair out of its pigtails, giving it a few desultory strokes with the comb before running his fingers down the back of her head, roughly parting her hair down the middle. 

Futaba squeezed her eyes shut as a shiver ran down her back. It wasn’t like nobody had ever run their fingers through her hair before. Sojiro helped her dye her roots every six weeks or so. Ann liked to weave little braids into her hair as they sat on the couch watching magical girl anime. So _basically_ , she told herself sternly, she needed to _settle the hell down_ and focus on important things, like the impending doom facing her during self-introductions in homeroom, or the cleanliness of nuclear power versus the public’s perceptions of the danger of a plant in their neighborhood, or blockchain encryption. 

The comb stopped midway down her head. “Did I pull too hard?”

“No. It’s fine.” Futaba willed her eyes open, and hoped her ears weren’t red. “Do you need me to sit down?”

“No. You’re short enough that I can reach without difficulty.”

“Screw you too, Inari.”

He snorted as he finished up, tying off her pigtails with the green elastics provided. “There. Much neater.”

Futaba tilted her head as she looked at herself in the mirror, turning her head left and right. She tugged one pigtail over her shoulder, then sighed, shoulders slumping.

“It doesn’t speak to me either,” Yusuke said with a furrowed brow, because while nine times out of ten he spouted irritating nonsense, he often managed to uncannily read her mind that tenth time. “What’s this about?”

“High school debut,” Futaba mumbled as she tugged her hair free. “New year, new me! Or whatever. It’s a trope. Nobody has to know what you were like in middle school. You can start fresh. And get super hot or whatever, I guess. It’s dumb.”

“Like a butterfly, emerging from its cocoon?”

“No, that’s twee.”

“What?”

“Low-effort metaphor. One star. Not your best work.”

Yusuke harrumphed as he took hold of her hair again, pulling it back into a high ponytail. “And yet if you examine it, you’ll find it apt.”

“Sure. It fits. It just sucks. It’s basic. You’re just cranky because you know I’m right.”

Futaba let her eyes wander around her cocoon as Yusuke, pretending to ignore her, muttered to himself as he tried to twist her ponytail around itself into a bun. It half-fit, at least. She’d spent months hibernating, among comfortable blankets in an enclosed, safe space, surrounded by silicon chips and potato chips and the looming threat of losing her mind. It just would have been nice to emerge fully formed into the world again instead of stumble out, a halfway-there work in progress. 

“Do you have hair pins?”

“Uhh. I think so? Check that shelf over there.”

He seemed to find success, to Futaba’s surprise, and resumed his work. She tended to accumulate miscellaneous hair clips and fasteners basically at random, but as all she usually felt like doing with her hair was brushing it and letting it be, they quickly absorbed into the general detritus of her room.

“A debut… Hmm. While I understand your logic, surely there’s nothing about your style that fundamentally needs changing.”

Said by another boy, to another girl, that probably would have been a compliment. Said by Yusuke, it didn’t rattle Futaba at all. The more someone’s style aligned with something mysterious and nebulous in their soul, the more thrilled Yusuke got. Ann wearing an avant-garde piece of fashion and Ryuji wearing his most comfortable gym clothes elicited the same reaction from him. More than once, Ryuji had shown up to a Phantom Thieves meeting wearing some character shirt from a convenience store clearance sale, only for Yusuke to wax poetic about how especially Ryuji-like he looked on that day. If Futaba _really_ wanted a compliment, all she’d have to do would be to wear a Vocaloid shirt and half of a cheap cosplay, and wait for the delighted comments about how she was Expressing Her True Soul.

Not that she wanted compliments, or anything. Not really. Shut up.

“Mm. No. I just… I don’t know how to act, I guess.” Futaba shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe… maybe it’s like a mask. Like our thief outfits. When I’m Oracle, I’m super cool and confident! So, if I look like a cool and confident high school girl…”

“I see. Nevertheless, a mask can be a burden just as it can be a shield. Surely it would be more comfortable to just be yourself.”

“Twee. Again. Be yourself, and everyone will like you?”

“No,” Yusuke muttered through the bobby pins he was holding in his mouth. Futaba winced as he accidentally tugged a small section of hair in his attempts to get the bun to stay in place. “I didn’t say everyone will like you. That’s immaterial. I just said be yourself.”

Futaba was silent, wondering whether that was meant to be comforting and why it somehow was, until Yusuke sighed and yanked the pins free. She yelped as the elastic caught. “Hey!”

“It won’t hold. I think your hair is too thin. We should go the classical route. Do you have scissors?”

“No! No no no! Absolutely not!” Futaba clutched at the back of her neck and whirled around, as if fearing Yusuke would pull out a katana and give her a poetic above-the-shoulder haircut right then and there.

“How committed are you to this new beginning?” he said, crossing his arms in irritation. 

“You were just telling me to be myself! Well, myself likes my hair! Get away!”

In that moment, Futaba was saved by the serendipitous appearance of Ann, who had come to see why now _both_ of them were going to be late for the first day of school. She scolded them down the stairs and down the street to LeBlanc, her familiar chatter a comforting soundtrack. In the cafe, Ryuji was lounging across an entire booth seat, uniform askew with little respect for the gravity of the day; Sojiro was behind the counter, scooping coffee grounds into a pour-over filter. 

He looked up as Futaba and her escort entered; she saw his shoulders relax, and she realized he’d probably thought the delay was due to her having last-minute doubts. She tilted her chin up, and stood up straight and confident, all four foot eleven inches of her. She _was_ having last-minute doubts, but he didn’t need to know that. He’d spent enough time worrying about her.

“Here.” Sojiro reached under the counter and placed Futaba’s orange bento box on the counter. Then, to Futaba’s surprise, he reached underneath again and came out with a somewhat more utilitarian black one. He jerked his chin at Yusuke.

“That one’s yours. Don’t make that face,” he growled. Futaba looked over to see Yusuke wearing the expression of a jungle explorer having just stumbled upon the fountain of youth. “I’ve been cooking for three all last year. Can’t seem to kick the habit. Didn’t want it to go to waste.”

“Softie,” Futaba teased, as Yusuke reverentially lifted the lunchbox and tucked it into his schoolbag, profusely thanking Sojiro. The older man waved him off. 

“Hey, Boss…” Ann leaned over the counter, a grin on her face, resting her chin on her hands.

“What? You think I’m made of lunch boxes? Get outside, or you’re all going to be late.” Ann laughed despite his scowl, because no matter the look on Sojiro’s face or the way he admonished them, he’d never accepted a single yen from any of them for endless afternoon snacks or morning coffees.

A photo outside LeBlanc of the students, then a photo of Futaba and Sojiro, then a photo taken with Ann’s phone with a funny filter to send to Akira— this was all turning into an alarming amount of fuss, as far as Futaba was concerned. She felt a guilty sense of relief as Ann and Ryuji rushed ahead of them with a farewell wave at the station to catch the rapidly approaching express train terminating at Shibuya. She knew that none of them meant to add pressure, that they were just happy and excited for her, but it was asking a lot for her to match their level of enthusiasm. 

Futaba took a deep breath as she swiped her passcard on the train station turnstile. If this world had any sense, the title would have displayed in the middle of her view to announce her entry to a new area.

****

**THE TRAIN**  
Quest: go to Otemachi Station. _Hint: your maps app will tell you which car to board!_

Out of her safe home base. Into the wilds. She’d ridden the train plenty by now, mostly to Akihabara and back (luckily a similar route as that to Kosei), but rush hour was a different beast. She stumbled as she tried to avoid a rushing businessman, only to be shoulder-checked by a woman approaching from behind. 

“Barrier activated!” she yelped, as she darted behind Yusuke. “Onward. Part the seas!”

It didn’t improve once they actually boarded the train. The commuters weren’t quite packed in like sardines, but there were no seats left, and Futaba realized with a lurch in her stomach that they were probably going to end up doing That Pose. Yusuke politely shoved a path to the opposite wall of the train, and— yep, gestured for her to squeeze by him into a protected spot against the door. She ducked under his arm as he grasped the overhead strap, leaning against the door and taking hold of the pole herself. And here she was, safely cocooned in a corner facing Yusuke, whose giraffe-like stature protected her from the crowds. How lame. How cliche. How embarrassing. She stared straight ahead at the fine weave of his shirt. Apparently even on the first day of school, he broke dress code by not wearing his uniform jacket. Had he spilt paint on it? Had he sold it at a pawnshop to buy a stack of canvases? Did it simply not meet his exacting aesthetic qualifications? If she played her cards right, this train of thought could probably carry her through the thirty minute train ride to Kosei, handily distracting her from the fact she was so close she could hear Yusuke breathing. 

The train began to move, and Futaba leaned into the wall. It was a hormonal adolescent crush, that was all. Perfectly natural, when one of your best friends had a classically handsome face right out of a samurai movie. Good thing it went away whenever he opened his mouth! …was something that was horrifyingly, embarrassingly untrue. Probably she just had awful taste. Luckily, nothing was ever going to happen about it, and she felt safe in the knowledge that her inconvenient feelings would, hopefully, fade with time.

“Right. I’ve decided.”

Futaba was jolted out of her thoughts by Yusuke’s firm tone. “Huh? Decided what?”

“I’m going to climb it.”

Futaba looked up at him, eyebrows furrowed. The train was running aboveground, and he was gazing out of the window as if he’d just been presented with an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet. She craned her neck over her shoulder, trying to follow his focused gaze. It was a clear day, the kind of beautiful weather that made Futaba want to put on six layers of sunscreen and hide in a darkened room. Pushing her glasses up her nose, she squinted into the distance, eyes tracking the horizon line as it appeared and disappeared between high-rise buildings.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Of course not. Not with your eyes. Look instead with your mind’s eye!” Yusuke flung out his arms, causing a nearby pair of middle school students to duck and step backwards nervously. His volume was rising, and several commuters were eyeballing him with a level of mild irritation that would have made Futaba barricade herself in her room for a week, if it was focused on her. “That beloved historical view, that ancient mountain rising in the distance. Subject of a thousand paintings and more. Modern construction and pollution has made Mt. Fuji difficult to glimpse from the heart of our metropolis. Therefore—“

“Um, actually, I think the problem is that we’re facing northwest,” Futaba interrupted, tilting her head and half-closing her eyes as she overlaid the train map on her mental map of Tokyo. “We wouldn’t be able to see it from here anyway.” 

“The sunrise that I will see from the peak…” Yusuke continued dreamily, as if she hadn’t spoken. “To paint from within the bosom of the subject of such cultural inspiration!”

“Wh—the _peak_? Like, real climbing? I thought you meant an afternoon hike or something! Inari, you can’t be serious!” she sputtered, mind suddenly filled with images of Yusuke pulling himself up a sheer cliff face with a climbing rope, then getting distracted trying to reach a clump of shiso leaves and falling to his doom.

Yusuke beamed, arms still flung into the air. The train began to curve along the track, and he began to lean backwards with the grace of a Buddha preparing to accept the whims of fate. Futaba grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him upright, all bashfulness subsumed in the more urgent goal of making sure he didn’t die of exposure or fall into a volcano caldera.

Futaba lowered her voice to a hiss, hoping against hope that the other passengers in the train car would stop paying attention to them. She knew Yusuke well enough to know that what might sound like an idle idea coming from anyone else’s mouth was deadly serious, coming from him. “Inari. Listen to me. It’s a _mountain._ There’s— avalanches! Blizzards! Oxygen deprivation! _Yeti_!”

“It’s not that tall,” Yusuke disagreed, thankfully lowering his voice to match her volume. “I haven’t done much research as of yet, but I believe I remember hearing that the hike to the top and back only takes two days or so. And climbing in summer—“

“Altitude sickness,” Futaba insisted. “Falling rocks. Yeti. Sub-zero temperatures.”

“You said Yeti twice.”

“There’s a valley on Mt Everest full of corpses!”  
“I dislike the cold, but even I can stand it for a few days. And regardless, the struggle will only intensify the satisfaction of seeing the sun rise from the peak.”

He’s really going to do it, Futaba thought to herself. She leaned forward, headbutting Yusuke in the chest with a groan of frustration.

“Didn’t you say at the museum a few weeks ago that even you wanted to flee Tokyo? Somewhere deep inside, even you must understand nature’s lure.”

Futaba turned her head to the side. “Did I? Oh…” She half-remembers the conversation; they’d been at a natural history museum on a free admission day, and as they were looking at a model of a Meiji-era telescope she’d made some comment about someday wanting to live somewhere she could see the stars, provided there was still a fast internet connection. Yusuke had said with far too much sincerity for the situation that he’d go with her, and her embarrassment had been such that she couldn’t even remember her response. She’d never get over the way Yusuke would just _say things_ sometimes, as if he wasn’t even listening to himself. “I meant, like, Nagano or something. Somewhere that still has vending machines. Just somewhere without so many— people!”

At Shibuya station, the train went from “crowded” to “unbreathably packed”, and the ebb and flow of passengers precluded most conversation for the rest of the ride. When they disembarked at Otemachi, Futaba felt like she’d been pulled backwards through a hedge, but somehow, miraculously, she realized that for the entire ride, she hadn’t worried about her first day of school once.

She tried to keep that momentum going as they walked the few blocks to Kosei’s elaborate front gates. She overthought things too much, that was her problem, she told herself sternly. If she stopped paying so much attention to whether or not she was about to have a panic attack, she’d probably be a hell of a lot less nervous. 

At least Kosei’s physical appearance itself was a distraction. Her student handbook had waxed poetic about the architect, a visionary in the field sought after by business magnates and princes alike. As Futaba stared up at the imposing edifice, she found herself thinking about Okumura, about Shido, and her fingers began to itch. Surely there was something to discover here. A school so established and well-respected had to have some skeletons in its closet, and she paradoxically felt herself start to calm down as her interest was piqued. What she wouldn’t give to be in front of her computer, digging up dirt she was suddenly sure was there.

She realized her hands were clenched on the back of Yusuke’s shirt, as if she were a remora frantically clinging to a lanky, underfed shark. She talked herself through uncurling her fingers one by one, and took a deep breath. 

“Well, this is my stop,” she said with pretended cheerfulness, looking to her right at the teachers holding clipboards and ushering flocks of first-years into the main hall. “Gonna make like an egg and beat it.”

Yusuke nodded gravely. “I wish you luck in pudding up with the stress of the day.”

Futaba grimaced.

“Pudding up with it,” Yusuke repeated. “Because pudding is made with eggs—“

“I don’t like anything that you just said, so I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say it.”

“Nevertheless.” Futaba jumped a little in surprise as Yusuke lifted a hand to touch her shoulder gently. He never seemed to mind when she clutched onto him in a crowd, but otherwise he didn’t tend to initiate physical—affection? Is that what this was? Was this affection? Did he know this was affection? She felt herself start to turn red. “You’re not alone. Not any more. Remember that.”

“Y-yeah, well. You too. I mean, neither are you. I mean.” It was said with the same energy as telling a waiter to enjoy their meal, and Futaba stumbled over her words trying to recover.

Yusuke smiled anyway, and Futaba took a deep breath.

She turned around, squared her shoulders, and marched into enemy territory.


	2. Tuesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone so, so much for all the nice comments I've gotten recently. There have kind of been a lot of them, and I can't reply to them all, and like, is something going on? Did I get linked somewhere? lol
> 
> Anyway I'm a nurse and I haven't been able to do much on my days off but lie comatose in bed while playing Animal Crossing for fourteen hours straight, but getting so many supportive comments helped me get writing and finish this chapter up, and also cheered me up a lot. Thanks, everyone. Wash your hands.

“Hey, you’re Sakura-san, right?”

Futaba looked up. A girl with short, wavy hair was leaning over her desk, looking almost eager. Futaba was instantly on guard. In her experience, fellow students never approached her with anything good on their minds.

Futaba swallowed the meatball she had been chewing on. “Yes?” It came out squeaker than she’d intended, and she cleared her throat and tried again. “Um. Yes. Hi?”

“Someone’s looking for you!” the girl said, tilting her head towards the door. Futaba followed her line of sight to see Yusuke, looming over the threshold, and her hackles instantly went down. The girl was just a messenger, so that was all right. “He’s _cute_. How do you know him? Is he your boyfriend?”

“He’s a weirdo,” Futaba responded, putting the lid back on her half-finished bento and shoving her chair backwards as she stood up. 

“Who cares?” the girl said cheerfully as Futaba headed towards the door. “Introduce me sometime, ‘kay? It’s Minami! Minami Kaho!”

Futaba realized she was ducking her head, and made a conscious effort to stand up straight. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that the girl she’d spoken with wasn’t the only one eyeballing Yusuke. Some of them were even eyeballing _her_ , and she rolled that around in her head for a moment, working through the implications.

“How was the morning?” Yusuke asked her, as she fell into step beside him, walking away from the classroom.

“I think I have _clout_ ,” she said, somewhat awed. “I think you gave me clout. I’ve never had clout before. What do I do with it? It’s gonna last for like two days, max.”

He wrinkled his brow. “Why?”

“Because sooner or later, they’re gonna hear you talk.”

“Rude. Nothing I say is _that_ out of the ordinary.”

“Yeah, keep telling yourself that. Anyway, screw em.” Futaba shrugged. “Where’s that place you wanted to show me?”

Yusuke’s mouth twisted. “Isn’t it a little too early to write off potential friends among your classmates?”

He stopped at an external doorway, dropping a pair of shoes on the ground. Futaba was surprised to see they were her own black ankle boots, the ones with the gold zippers. She’d worn them to school that morning, having decided that one day of wearing the official school loafers was more than enough when most people would only see her indoor shoes anyway. “Nah. All my friend slots are full. I don’t think I have the space in my party for more,” she answered, as she crouched down to switch shoes. She hoped that Yusuke hadn’t spent too long investigating the shoe lockers looking for hers, or else people were going to start thinking he had a foot fetish. 

What she was really thinking was: people at this school have been rejecting you for two years, why would this class be any different? We’re ride or die and if they’re dicks to you, why would I want to be friends with them? What she was really thinking was: you’re a walking disaster but I’d rather be with you than with a hundred of them. What she was really thinking was: I’m a walking disaster too, so if they’re not cool with you they definitely won’t be cool with me, so I’d better not get my hopes up. What she was really thinking was: I’m scared of being rejected or bullied again, so why even try? What she was really thinking was: on the off chance of you giving a good first impression, the last thing I want is a gaggle of fangirls cooing over you for the next year.

( Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, having dreamt that she was unable to stop herself telling Yusuke what she was really thinking about him. )

They walked down the outer stairs, down a small path, and ended up in a secluded corner of the school gardens, a wrought-iron bench placed elegantly among a selection of flowering bushes. 

“It’s the most private area I’ve found as of yet,” Yusuke explained, sitting down on the bench and patting the seat next to him. “I’ve always been soothed by the sheltered atmosphere.” Futaba looked around at the scene. The little area was bordered on two sides by the walls of a club building, and sheltered by trees. It was calming in its seclusion, and somehow, she felt annoyed by it.

“I was doing fine,” she said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It came out whinier than she’d intended, and she mentally kicked herself, wincing. 

Yusuke didn’t look particularly offended, at least, just mildly confused. “Sorry?”

“I was fine eating in the classroom,” she explained, looking at her feet. “I didn’t need rescuing. We can use our phones during lunch, so.” She hadn’t exactly been enjoying herself, but she had been able to pat herself on the back a bit for doing her best normal human impression; surely, if she could do that long enough, she might even stop being scared of talking to people. Fake it ’til you make it, right?

“Yes, I know,” Yusuke said, nonplussed. “I wasn’t rescuing you. I just wanted to eat lunch together.”

Futaba swore she could _hear_ her face turning red.

Yusuke, the bastard, didn’t seem to think that was a particularly daring thing to say, as when she snuck a look at him he was merely chewing on a bit of rolled egg with every sign of enjoyment, cool as a cucumber. Wind taken out of her sails, there was nothing to do but plop down next to him and open her own lunchbox back up. 

Too mixed up by what she was thinking (Was she lying to herself? Did she want friends after all? Was she making excuses? Was she right to hold herself apart from her classmates?) to discuss her thoughts with Yusuke yet, she fell back on a familiar, safe topic: crime.

“I’ve been doing some research into Kosei’s financials,” she started, taking a quick bite of rice and continuing to chew as she talked. “Did you know the new computer lab in the east building was entirely funded by parent donations? Most of them were parents of last year’s graduating class, and it’s easy to trace who got into elite colleges and whose parents donated the most.”

“That’s barely a scandal,” Yusuke said, eyeing her open-mouthed chewing with mild distaste. Futaba grinned as she swallowed. It was so easy to get a rise out of him, it was downright comforting. Like the off-season training of the Yusuke-bothering Olympics. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s barely a secret that parents throw around wealth at preparatory schools such as Kosei.”

“Right,” Futaba agreed. “It’s not just that, though. Looking through the records, it seems that they’ve been releasing student records to people they shouldn’t be. I’m gonna have to dig a little further. There’s a couple kids in my year who had older siblings in that graduating class. Maybe they’re worth bugging…”

“Maybe.” Yusuke shrugged, lifting the last shred of egg in his chopsticks. Then he paused with it halfway to his mouth. “Bugging as in bothering, or bugging as in electronically surveilling?”

“Haven’t decided yet,” Futaba answered promptly. There was a brief wavering expression on Yusuke’s face, presumably as he decided whether to be bothered or not; he evidently settled on “not”, continuing to eat without further reply. 

It was funny, Futaba thought, how unconcerned he tended to seem about most things not related to art. Anyone who didn’t know him well enough might even think him self-centered. He sometimes seemed to be wearing thick blinders, narrowly focused on aesthetics or beauty or the exact difference between indigo and navy (she’d tuned him out on that one, after he’d decided that mistaking Kosei’s blazer color warranted a ten minute rhapsody on more shades of blue than she’d ever known existed.) And then he’d go ahead and say something that proved that somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d been listening and quietly observing all along.

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“You said once that you were only in the business of justice for the sake of your mother. Of all of us, I didn’t expect you to keep pursuing justice. Why dig into this?”

Like that. He didn’t seem critical or annoyed, just asking a straightforward question, and she supposed that deserved a straightforward answer. Not before a joke first, of course.

“I’ve gone over to the side of justice for justice’s sake, like a true Phantom Thief!” she said, the last part in as loud a stage whisper as she could manage. Then she scuffed her toes on the ground, staring down at her boots as she tried to formulate her thoughts.

“I’m not sure what answer I—“

“My mom wanted me to go to private school for kindergarten and elementary,” Futaba said, interrupting Yusuke’s retort. “I didn’t really get it. I mean I was like six, so. I went to the interviews, but I didn’t get into any of the schools she liked. So I just went to the local public school. I got bullied a lot, and figured I’d hate wherever I went next just as much. So I didn’t really try on entrance exams, and went to a junior high that was just okay. I figured she was always really disappointed in me. I mean, I was smart, so why couldn’t I get it together?”

“I doubt that.” She appreciated Yusuke’s measured response, even though the reassurance wasn’t really needed. She’d figured this one out already, as she went on to explain. 

“I remembered, when I was getting ready for high school entrance exams last winter— I’m still kind of piecing it together, you know, what really happened and what didn’t—“ Yusuke nodded with understanding. “Anyway, one night when I was eight or so, I couldn’t sleep and went back downstairs after my bedtime. Sojiro was over, and so I eavesdropped, of course.”

“Of course.”

She’d remembered the moment with clarity, once she remembered it at all. The cold wood floor on her bare feet, one hand on the wall to guide her in the darkness. The soft clink and hiss as Sojiro opened a can of beer. Her mother’s voice, low and furious, raging against something Futaba hadn’t understood, not until she herself had fallen under the weight of this messed-up society, and then came up swinging. 

“And mom was super frustrated. I didn’t get it then, since I didn’t understand some of what she was saying. I thought she was frustrated with _me_ , and how she couldn’t make me do well. But putting it together now, I know what she was talking about. I never got into those fancy schools as a kid because they were too fancy to let in a kid without a dad.”

She looked sideways at Yusuke; he had his arms crossed, and his forehead wrinkled. “So you came to Kosei because…”

“To show her that private schools aren’t shit,” she replied promptly, and his brow cleared.

“Yes, that sounds like you.” He still seemed like he was waiting, somehow, though, and Futaba gazed around the courtyard like she could find the answer to his unspoken question in the immaculate bushes. 

“Two birds with one stone. Do well like she wanted me to, and take those snooty bastards down a peg,” she explained further, swinging her legs back and forth, drawing designs with her toes in the dirt. “Plus… you know.”

“Do I?”

“ _You_ know.” She sighed impatiently. “Don’t make me spit it out.”

“I’m not making you do anything. I’m just sitting here.”

“ _I’m just sitting here,_ ” she said, in a passable imitation of his most serious tone of voice. “Bah.” Actually, this was fine. The best way to say something slightly embarrassing to someone you have a horrible crush on is to act like it slipped out of you and then make them drag it out of you bit by bit. All the catharsis of expressing yourself, none of the responsibility of being too forward. 

“Are you possibly referring to the many pleasant hours we spend in each other’s company on a regular basis?”

“Well not when you put it like _that,_ ” she said, rolling her eyes. “But sure. I mean… I wouldn’t have wanted to do this by myself, even if I could have. Can I go back to eating lunch now?”

“Please, continue eating. Present my compliments to the boss.” Futaba risked a look out of the corner of her eye, and saw a faint smile on Yusuke’s face that made her abruptly look away again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some business to attend to.”

While Futaba stared, he pulled a sketchbook out of his bag, and then crawled under a rhododendron bush. 

————

“That’s her?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Futaba followed Ann’s pointing finger down to the courtyard below. The after-school club fair was in full swing, booths and tables set up in neat rows. Members of the soccer club were doing some kind of rhythmic chant, the sound mingling with the faint bass-line coming from a music club’s speakers. The girl Ann was pointing at, with bushy hair and poor posture, was standing in front of one of the cultural club booths, apparently deep in conversation with the girls running it. 

“So that’s her, huh.” Futaba wrapped her fingers through the links of the protective netting surrounding the roof, standing on tiptoes to get a marginally better view. “What about that guy? The one she was obsessed with.”

“What about him?” Ann shrugged. “I don’t really know him too well. He’s living his best life, probably. I see them talk sometimes, but she’s not following him around any more. I thought you said you found her blog?”

“I did, but there weren’t any more entries after we changed her heart in mementos.” The bushy-haired girl took a flyer, and walked out of sight, off to the next booth. Futaba leaned back onto her heels. “And I couldn’t trace the username to any other sites. So I figured, what if she just went underground? And went back to her old ways somewhere else? This is good,” she said, with a firm nod. “I guess it stuck!”

“Futaba…” Ann hesitated, looking over her shoulder to where Ryuji was wrestling with pouring a forty-pound bag of dirt into a neat row of planters. She turned back towards Futaba, with a worried frown. “How’s it going? If something’s wrong, talk to me before it gets bad, okay?”

“No, no, I’m not worried about _my_ change of heart!” Futaba said hastily, waving her hands in front of her. Behind Ann, Ryuji cursed as he spilled half the bag of soil on the ground. “I’m okay. Really. I just… wanted to make sure it actually happened. I think.”

“Mmm… I think I get what you mean,” Ann said, cocking her head and twirling one pigtail around her finger. “It’s like, everything’s too… normal, right?”

Futaba turned around and slid down the fencing to sit on the ground, tucking her plaid skirt under her. Ann’s plaid skirt, actually. Sure, Ann _could_ have signed her in as a guest at the office, but why bother with that when she had a spare Shujin uniform lying around? Dress in black and yellow and all the bees in the hive will assume you’re supposed to be there. Social engineering is the most efficient way to hack, and heists are a hard habit to break. “Kinda.”

Ann unwrapped the sweatshirt from around her waist and laid it on the concrete before sitting down next to Futaba. “It’s like…” the small girl hesitated before continuing. “I’m at school! I’m back in the world! I reached my goal! Okay, great! Now what?” She shrugged as Ryuji dusted dirt off his hands and meandered over to them, leaning against the chain link. “Is that it? Is it all automatic now? Am I in the endgame? Do I just make a bunch of normal friends, and go to karaoke after school, and get into a good college, and, and start working an _office job_ where my boss yells at me to make _coffee_?” she finished, throwing her hands in the air. She knew it sounded silly even as it came out of her, but it was the only way she could find to verbalize the simmering panic that without a goal, without every day being a struggle to stay grounded in reality or a fight for the truth, without revenge for her mother plugged into her GPS, she was either going to fly off a cliff or submit to cruise control, and she _didn’t know which one was worse._

“Okay, well, this is literally your second day, so maybe chill for ten seconds,” Ryuji interjected, looking faintly alarmed. Ann swatted at him.

“This is serious, Ryuji!” she insisted, then turned back to Futaba. “But, I mean… he’s not exactly wrong. It’s not like you have to have your life planned out. Unless Kosei’s career counselors are way intense or something?”

“No, this is totally homegrown,” Futaba sighed. “100% organic hand-raised anxiety.”

“Well, knock it off,” Ryuji said, ruffling her hair. She batted his hand away without malice. “Can’t see you working an office job, anyway. Unless you start the company! One hit app and _we’ll_ be the ones serving _you_ coffee.”

“ _You_ will,” she retorted, starting to smile despite herself. “Ann’s gonna star in all the ads.”

“Yes, boss,” he said with a grin. 

“Anyway.” She tucked her hair neatly behind her ears, then wrapped her arms around her knees. “It’s like… since I don’t have anything big to worry about, I’m worrying about little things again. I don’t know how to act around my classmates, I don’t know how I feel about making friends, I get freaked out whenever the teacher calls on me…” Maybe it was that, as much as what she’d said earlier about her mother, that was making her latch on to trying to find some scandal at Kosei. Something bigger than herself, something to keep her looking outward instead of inward. 

“So here’s what I think,” Ryuji said, sitting across from her and Ann, flopping down onto the ground and stretching out his legs. “I’ve been doin’ a lotta thinking, actually, after last year. Kinda brought a lot of clarity to some shit I went through. School’s just school, yeah? It’s not like it’s your ultimate goal. You started going again, and that’s awesome, but nobody said you have to _like_ it. It’s just a place that you are. Finish three years, and it lets you go on to things you really wanna do. So maybe just take it day by day, yeah?”

The two girls were silent, and Ryuji rubbed the back of his neck, ears going pink. “Uh. Or something. Right?”

“That… was actually really smart, Ryuji,” Ann said admiringly. “Who would have thought?”

“Oh, shut up. Fuck you.” Ann batted her eyelashes, and Ryuji made a rude gesture back.

Futaba shook her head slowly. “Ryuji, Ryuji. I underestimated you.”

“That scares me. Why does it scare me?”

“You’ve been promoted from coffee guy to secretary. Keep it up, and you could make app tester by autumn.”

————

“It’s not a binary,” Akira said, ruffling his hair. Futaba wrinkled her nose.

“Nice one,” she said, making the OK sign with her fingers at the webcam. 

“Well, it’s not,” he said in his most reasonable tone of voice. It was soothing instead of irritating, the way she felt when most people tried to be reasonable at her. She sighed and slumped back in her computer chair as she listened. “Even after we changed your heart, it took a while for you to be comfortable leaving the house. Starting school’s thrown you again. It’s not a matter of a hundred percent sick or a hundred percent well.”

She grumbled and slid further down in her chair, until all she could see in the little square in the upper-right of the Skype call was her eyes peeking over the bottom. “Don’t tell me not to push myself. That’s what Makoto keeps saying. It’s kind of starting to get annoying. I liked Ryuji’s advice better. It was pretty zen.”

“I’m not going to,” Akira said, and Futaba raised herself back into a sitting position with interest. “You’re at your best when you’re pushing yourself. You just need to figure out where to push yourself _to_.”

“Right. Ryuji’s right that I don’t have to like school, but I _do_ have to beat it.” She snapped her fingers, and pointed at the screen. “List time.”

“Bingo.”

She rummaged around by her printer, taking a sheet of blank paper. She stared at the size of it, then folded it in half. The length of the blank page was a little intimidating.

“Okay,” she said, continuing to stare, laser-like, at the page. Then she lifted her head to look expectantly at Akira. “Uh. I think I need some parameters, or I’m gonna spiral again.”

“This week,” Akira decided, crossing his arms. “What do you want to accomplish this week?”

Futaba tilted her head. That wasn’t so bad. It was already Tuesday, and Kosei had half days on Saturday.

“I want to… say good morning to someone in my class,” she said, thinking of Kana. (She’d gotten a LINE message yesterday of Kana in her high school uniform, a grey sweater and plaid skirt. Kana had chosen a school three hours away from home, and was living in the dorms, using money from the two jobs she’d worked the past few months. Even if someone changes, some things are hard to forgive.) “And I want to eat with my classmates, once. Do you think that’s too pushy?”

Akira shook his head with a smile. Futaba chewed on her fingernail. Without Akira, without Ann and Yusuke and Makoto and the rest, she probably wouldn’t have even wanted to try to make friends, too wounded by how badly she’d been bullied before. But now that she had real, concrete proof that not everyone her age was automatically going to be horrible to her— well, it was only human to want to reach out and connect, right? 

“I should probably do something nice for Inari, too,” she admitted with a sigh. “I kinda snapped at him today. I mean, I don’t think he noticed, but _I_ noticed.”

Akira shrugged and half-nodded, indicating by that single gesture that the things Yusuke noticed and didn’t notice were unpredictable by any mortal being, and it was probably best not to worry about it too much. 

“I’ll add ‘turn in all my homework’, too, as a gimme. And ‘go to all my classes every day,’” she added, because it had been harder to get up this morning, and Sojiro had had to pull the covers off her to get her moving after she’d thrown her alarm across the room. “But just for this week. I’ve decided I’m allowed one freebie skip day a month.”

“Sounds reasonable. Anything else?”

“Oh, and I think there’s something mega-shady going on with Kosei’s college admission rate, so I’m gonna get that sorted out.”

“Are you sure you need until Saturday to do that? Sounds like an afternoon project to me.”

“Don’t sass me.” Futaba grinned at the camera, and Akira grinned back. He normally let smiles come over his face slowly, ducking his head as if he could hide behind his fringe; this smile had an echo of Joker to it. 

“What’s your reward?”

“Mm.” She pursed her lips as she thought, picking up a pencil from her desk and trying to balance it on top of them. It clattered to the floor after a second, and she let it rest there. It had found its destiny. “Right now I’m just looking forward to sleeping in on Sunday. I dunno, I’ll see what I hunger for in the moment. Okay, that’s over, enough business,” she added briskly, clapping her hands. “Show the people what they want!”

As she drummed her hands on the desk, the video on the screen jumped and shook as Akira stood up with his phone. The screen froze for a moment as he hit the button to switch to the back camera, and then Futaba was rewarded with a clear shot of Morgana spread-eagled on Akira’s unmade bed in a patch of sunlight, snoring quietly.


	3. Wednesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may have begun as me writing loosely connected scenes but I promise I'm going somewhere quite specific with it and it isn't just a character study. I am capable of writing something other than character studies. Probably

“Hey, Sakura-san. What’s your zodiac sign?”

Futaba froze as her classmate Kaho Minami interrupted her lunch for the second time in two days, scooting a chair over and plopping a lunchbox down on Futaba’s desk. 

“Oh, right,” the girl said when Futaba didn’t respond, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Mind if I sit here? Sorry, didn’t mean to interrogate you!”

“It’s fine!” Futaba said, too loudly by her account, but Minami didn’t seem to notice. Instead she pulled out her phone and looked up expectantly. “Uh. What was the question?”

“Zodiac sign?” Minami repeated, popping the lid off her bento. “Got a new app. I’ve been asking everyone!

She brought this on herself, Futaba realized grimly. She’d said good morning to Minami at the shoe lockers this morning, taking the chance to complete one of her sub-quests as soon as she saw someone she recognized. Now here she was, trapped while a classmate… said friendly things to her? Huh. Actually, maybe this was fine?

“Snake,” she said. “Or, pisces? Which one did you…”

“And blood type?”

“AB?”

“O-kay, so… hey, is snake right?” Minami said, cocking her head. “Are you sixteen already? Did you study abroad or something? Doesn’t the school year start some other time overseas?”

“I… I was sick for a while,” Futaba said, as the other girl returned to tapping on her phone. “So I’m a year behind.” She braced herself for a continued barrage of questions, culminating in the other girl somehow discovering the truth and scoffing at her before spreading it to the rest of the class. She could make up something on the fly, no problem, she’d just have to take notes to keep her story straight. Leukemia’s out, pretending to be a kid with cancer was too underhanded even for her. Brain surgery? No, people would want to see the scars, and besides, her hair was too long. Didn’t doctors have to shave your head when you had brain surgery? Maybe heart surgery. That could get her out of gym class, too. Crap, but that could get teachers calling Sojiro to confirm. Life would be so much easier if wasting anime girl disease was a real thing, and she could just cough into a handkerchief every so often and be super vague about why she can’t play sports. But that’s on the right track— some kinda infection, maybe? Mono? That could last for a couple months, right? And it’s one and done, no symptoms to fake now. Mono. Perfect!

“Ohh, that sucks,” the other girl said with a nod. “Must be nice to be better. Okay, which do you want, romantic? Scholastic? Let’s start with the general one! ‘Keep an eye on your surroundings, or you’re liable to miss something important. If you want to keep yourself grounded, talk to a rabbit.’ Do you know any rabbits?”

Futaba stuttered, carefully constructed web of lies swept to the side, abandoned and unneeded. “U-um, I dunno… what year is that again?”

Futaba was saved from further interrogation by Minami waving over one of her other friends, and over the course of their lunchtime conversation Futaba learned several things. 

The other girls had known each other since middle school, and apparently, Minami always “did this” with fortune-telling when she wanted an icebreaker.  
Minami’s father was some kind of entertainment producer, just one more notch in the column of “people here sure are high-class”. Futaba wondered how Yusuke dealt with it. He probably considered it beneath his notice.  
The other girl had an older brother who’d graduated last year and entered medical school, hoping to become a surgeon. Futaba put a mental sticky note on that one, remembering she was supposed to be investigating corruption at the school. Well… ‘supposed to’ was a strong word for it. Call it an independent study project to keep herself grounded.  
Nobody here was watching her as closely as she was watching herself.

That wasn’t a bad thing. The bullying in elementary school had been straightforward, taunts on the playground and gum on her chair, but in middle school it had gone deep underground. Thirteen year old girls can be cruel enough that a country could probably weaponize them as part of the international arms race, and Futaba had learned too late how to tell which smiles were fake and which laughter was mocking. (Things had gotten even worse after her mother died, when she’d started hearing whispers that weren’t really there, but before that there’d been enough whispers that _were_ really there that she didn’t think anyone could blame her for that.) She’d prepared to concoct an elaborate backstory for herself, but Minami hadn’t really seemed too thrown off about her missing year. Maybe people generally weren’t that concerned about other people unless they had a reason to be. It was a little jarring, but not unwelcome, to realize that she might not be a total pariah here like she had been during the rest of her school days. It felt like slipping on a pair of shoes that still needed to be broken in.

She’d just begun to relax infinitesimally when the conversation turned to a popular music show. Futaba ate her lunch in silence, never having watched it, until something rang a bell in her mind.

“Isn’t that the one where the vote numbers were all off?” she blurted out, hastily swallowing a carrot. “They’re too perfect. People online are saying they’re fixed.”

“No,” Minami’s friend said, with a decidedly chilly tone. “Kaho’s dad’s the producer, so don’t you think that’s kind of a rude accusation?”

“I— I didn’t mean—“ Futaba stammered, thrown. “I don’t know… I wasn’t really—“

“Don’t worry about it,” Minami said kindly, shaking her head. Done with her lunch, she’d begun snacking on a bag of chocolates taken out of her school bag, and dropped one onto Futaba’s desk, presumably as a peace offering. “There’s always crazy rumors about anything with entertainment. I’m used to it, and besides, nothing’s as fun as a juicy rumor. It’s why my dad won’t let _me_ try out for any of those idol shows! Anyway, it could be true.” Her friend opened her mouth to protest, but Minami waved a hand. “Competition shows are always a little rigged. Real life isn’t as interesting as a specially designed plotline. And gossip and rumors drum up ratings!”

Still rattled from the sudden confrontation, Futaba lapsed into silence for the rest of the lunch period. Torn between wanting to get along with a girl who seemed genuinely friendly towards her and the gut feeling that she was never going to be able to stop putting her foot in her mouth, she decided she’d go and bother Yusuke after school. He may not be predictable, but at least he was straightforward in his weirdness. 

————

Yusuke was asleep on the wide counter-like windowsill in the art room, slumped against the wall. His lashes fluttered slightly as Futaba approached, but he remained asleep. She considered waking him, but noting that he had earbuds in, decided to satisfy her curiosity first. Picking up his phone, which had been set down next to him, she unplugged the cord from the headphone jack. Her own were around her neck, but to pair them with the bluetooth she’d have to unlock his phone. No problem. 

Let’s see. Despite the fact that he had the technological literacy of a fifty-year-old rice farmer, he was probably at about step three on the security ladder… she typed in 2801, and allowed herself a satisfied grin as the phone screen unlocked and displayed the home screen. Social engineering and basic logic were usually as useful when hacking as any actual programming. 

(Incidentally, her self-designed security scale went as such:

Step one: No passcode (Haru)  
Step two: 1111, 1234, 7777, et cetera (Ryuji)  
Step three: Birthdays, anniversaries, other numbers with personal meaning (Yusuke)  
Step four: Keypad numbers to word conversion (Akira, Ann)  
Step five: Truly randomly generated codes (Makoto)

Of course, none of that really mattered, considering how easy it was to write a program to crack a numerical passcode that had at maximum a paltry one million possibilities. But it was still interesting to see the way people’s minds worked. 

As for herself, she didn’t use a passcode at all. She’d designed and installed a facial recognition unlock six months before phone companies had implemented it for mass production.)

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected— classical, maybe? Traditional enka music? Whale songs? Regardless, she found herself surprised when she synced her headphones and found he had been listening to classic rock sung in English. It wasn’t that it _didn’t_ suit him, it was just so far outside what she’d expected that it hadn’t even seemed like an option worth preparing a reaction for. 

“Hey,” she said a few minutes later, pulling one headphone off her ear as she saw his eyelashes start to flutter. “I didn’t know you spoke English.”

He squinted at her, bleary-eyed. His hair was mussed and stuck to one cheek (5 star rarity! Disheveled Inari! NOT FAKE real authentic CRYPTID sighting NO PHOTOSHOP), and Futaba willed herself to stop imagining brushing it away. “I don’t. My grades in English class are fine, but I don’t have much interest in it.” A pause. “What?”

She held up his phone and wiggled it at him, half-singing along to the music “ _I ain’t no fortunate son._ ” He grasped at the end of his earphones somewhat comically, as Futaba pulled her headphones completely off her head. She allowed herself to feel smug that she probably understood more of the music than he did as she handed his phone back. Years of living online, playing foreign games and chatting with foreign fans, had done more for her English vocabulary than formal classes in school ever had. 

Yusuke shook his head as he took the phone with one hand, smoothing his hair with the other. “Ah, I see. Music with lyrics distracts me while I paint; I tend to listen to either instrumentals or songs sung in a foreign language. Ann pointed out to me one day last year that Goemon looked ‘rockabilly’ and gave me some American music recommendations.”

“Ohh.” Futaba rested her chin in her hands. It made her happy, somehow, that she could learn new things about Yusuke. Not that she’d ever let him know. “It’s mostly anime music for me. Or idol pop,” she volunteered.

“Somehow, I feel like I knew that,” Yusuke replied, stretching his arms over his head. He turned his face to the window, looked at his phone with a frown, and swung his legs over to the floor.

“Sooo, what’s the plan for the afternoon?” Futaba said. She went to stick her hands in her pants pockets, remembering too late she was wearing a uniform skirt. Her hands hit her blazer, and she fumbled for a moment, not sure whether she was going for the blazer pockets or the skirt pockets underneath the blazer, before giving up and linking her hands behind her back. 

Luckily for her, Yusuke noticed exactly none of it. “I have a job,” he said, standing up and rolling his neck. “In Akihabara.”

“You…” Futaba pressed her lips together as she tried to decide between six different jokes at once. 

“I’m not sure of the exact location, so I was hoping you would show me—“

“Hold on,” Futaba said, holding her hands in front of her and beginning to snicker. “Hold on. You didn’t get approached by a shady recruiter, again, did you? Let me tell you, they— snrk— they never tell you— they never show you the costume you gotta—“ 

Yusuke looked down his nose at her as she dissolved into giggles, unable to get the rest of the joke out. “Are you quite finished?”

“Y-yeah. Ahem. Hoo boy.” She took a deep breath. “If they make you wear a maid uniform, I want pics.”

“I’m simply holding an overnight place in line for the new smartphone release tomorrow,” Yusuke said with great dignity. “I know better than to trust an opportunity handed to me on the street.”

“What? No you don’t.”

“Don’t mock me.”

“Request denied.”

She was given even more fuel once they disembarked from the train at Akihabara station, Futaba having agreed to show Yusuke the way to the particular electronics store he was looking for. Yusuke paused against the wall, out of the way of the streaming crowds, and began digging in his bag. “This may be a good opportunity… aha.” He retrieved a Kosei tie from the depths of his schoolbag, dragging several tangled-up pencils along with it. “I need to be blindfolded.”

“Keep your kinks to yourself,” Futaba said automatically, the need to make a snappy comeback overriding the fear of being overheard. Yusuke must have been in a good mood, though, because he let out a huff of air that almost sounded like a laugh as he untangled the tie.

“Don’t be crass. It’s for art. I’ve been thinking that to become truly invigorated, I need to cut myself off from my most treasured sense. What might I learn, forced to rely on my hearing and smell? What might I translate that to on the page?”

Futaba looked at the tie he was holding out to her. “And you need to do that… at three in the afternoon in a subway station?”

“Why not?”

She didn’t have an answer to that, so she stood on her tiptoes and tied the tie around Yusuke’s head, as he adjusted the coverage over his eyes.

Twenty seconds later, after he walked into the railing bisecting the stairs, he agreed to sacrifice a bit of “the thrilling uncertainty of opening my soul to the whims of fate” to allow Futaba to navigate.

“Here,” she said, nudging him sideways onto the yellow stripe on the floor. “Feel the bumps through your feet? My mom told me once they’re so blind people can still find their way.”

“Aha! How considerate. Of course. I’ve seen them my whole life, yet it is only when I don’t see them that I can truly understand their worth. I’m reaching new heights already!”

“Uh-huh,” Futaba said, trying her best to stay directly behind him, out of the attack radius of the confused looks of fellow commuters. “S-school project,” she mumbled to anyone who seemed about to ask. “Studying accessibility. It’s a school project.” 

(Sometimes she wondered who was weirder— Yusuke, for letting bystanders’ opinions bounce off him like water off a duck, or herself, for being nearly paralyzed by the mere suggestion that a stranger in the area could be acknowledging her existence.)

“Nuh-uh,” she said as Yusuke mounted the stairs to the street and made to set off to the left, yanking his collar to stop him. She herded him over to the side, out of the way of the rest of the crowd. “Status report first. Are you actually getting anything out of this? Also, that’s not the way to the store.”

“I most certainly am getting something out of this. The susurration of the crowds… does it not remind you of the echos in Mementos?”

“Eh. Mementos kinda sounded like any other crowd of people to me.”

“And being so on-guard for obstacles—“ Yusuke stopped mid-sentence, as Futaba winced, realizing the question had probably been rhetorical. “Huh. Really?”

“Yeah.” She scuffed the toe of her shoe on the ground. “I’m not really good at tuning out crowd noise. I kinda pay too much attention to it. Especially since—“ She scrunched up her face, unsure how deep to get in mid-afternoon during a fairly silly expedition. 

“Since?”

Well, it was probably fine. Yusuke was a lot of things, but he wasn’t judgmental.

Scratch that. Yusuke was _extremely_ judgmental, but only about things that didn’t actually matter. So that was okay. “There was a while where… I kept having flashbacks. I’d hear my mom, or see her, even… especially when I could hear people talking. It’s super easy for your brain to misinterpret stuff. So I’d hear a bunch of background noise, and my stupid brain would take it like some kinda attack.”

“Like pareidolia.”

“Is that a fancy word for paranoia? Not that you’re wrong, I guess.”

Yusuke shook his head. “It’s a word for seeing patterns where there are none. Like seeing the rabbit in the moon, or hearing messages in the white noise of a fan. It can be used to great effect to communicate certain dualities in visual media. In any case, is that the reason for—“

He reached out and touched the side of Futaba’s face.

She shrieked, and jumped to the side, losing her balance as she landed on the edge of her sneaker sole, and grabbing at a lamppost to keep herself from falling over. 

Yusuke pulled up the tie covering his eyes and stared at her.

“I was only gesturing to your headphones,” he said, sounding perplexed. “You were standing closer than I thought.”

“U-use your words next time!” Futaba said as she straightened up. She tugged on the hem of her blazer, then tucked her hair behind her ears, then brushed her skirt off, embarrassingly flustered. “You sure have enough of them!”

Yusuke replaced the blindfold, letting out a huff. He crossed his arms and tilted his head. “Regardless… yes. I think I see it. This has been most illuminating.”

“This way,” Futaba said, tugging on his sleeve to aim him in the right direction. “Has it?”

“Yes. It’s all about perspective. What does a worm see, emerging after a rainstorm? Inconsequential. The worm feels the cool damp of the air after the warmth of the soil. The worm feels a calling he cannot name, drawing him upwards, the culmination of millennia of instinct dwelling within himself. And yet there must be a way to convey those primal sensations visually. I was right— this avenue will only push me to strive to new heights of expression in my work.”

Futaba wondered whether to point out that worms were always blind, but that seemed to be beside the point. At least he was having fun. Even if he had given her a minor heart attack.

“It is,” she said eventually. “The headphones, I mean. They help.” She paused, then added, “Are you a rabbit? Your zodiac sign, I mean.”

“No, a dragon. Shouldn’t you know the order of the signs? It’s easy to determine, since I’m only a year older than you.”

Futaba scowled. “I’ve never really been interested in fortune telling.”

“Then why?”

“No reason.” She hesitated, chewing on a fingernail, as they stopped at a crosswalk. “Hey. Can I kinda… bounce some thoughts off you?”

“Now?”

 _Yes, now. While you can’t make me tongue-tied by staring at me as I’m trying to figure out what I’m saying. I’m bad enough with people watching me talk about this stuff as it is, I don’t need your 1000-watt laser vision boring through me._ “What, are you busy or something?”

“Yes. Clearly. I’m absorbing the city’s essence through my very pores, the better to distill it onto the page.”

Futaba groaned and yanked on his sleeve, since he wouldn’t be able to see her expression. _”Inari!_ ”

He stopped as they crossed the street onto the next block, lifting the tie to look at her with one concerned eye. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. It’s nothing major. J-just some stuff. Can we keep walking, please?”

He obliged, covering his eye again and turning to face forward. Futaba took a deep breath.

“So… you remember yesterday, when I said I didn’t want friends? I think it actually might not be too bad. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with at least being friendly, right?”

“I don’t see a problem with it. But you do, clearly.”

Futaba let out a huff of air as she nudged Yusuke to sidestep a maid cafe promoter handing out tissues. Somehow he got ahold of the pack of tissues anyway, but that was fine. At least in Akihabara people saw weird stuff on the streets all the time, whether it was catering to nerds or to tourists hoping to see a lot of weird nerd stuff. Yusuke stumbling down the street blindfolded barely merited a passing glance. 

“It’s like… with all the stuff that happened,” Futaba said vaguely, nervous about eavesdroppers in the way only someone extremely good at eavesdropping could be. “It was us versus them, you know? Except we’re not ‘us’ any more. So are we ‘them’ now? Am I supposed to be trying to be a ‘them’? ‘Cause I don’t think I really want to be a ‘them’, but it’s not like I wanna go back to being so isolated. You know? You must know. Right?”

Yusuke took a moment before responding, head tilted in thought. Futaba fell back to walk a little behind him as a foreign tourist couple tried to sneak a photo, wishing she was brave enough to make a rude gesture. 

“The depths of Mementos,” he said, finally, and Futaba let out a sigh of relief.

“ _Exactly!_ ” she said. “Right. That sense of, like—“

“—Being complicit in a society where the whole is less than the sum of its parts,” Yusuke finished for her, albeit probably more eloquently than she could have put it. “It’s something I’ve struggled with myself.”

“So… what did you figure out? This is it, by the way.” Futaba scuffed the toe of her sneaker on the ground. There were already five or six people in line outside the entrance to the electronics store, prepared with camp chairs and blankets. “Are you really gonna sit here all night?”

“Certainly. I’m being paid sixteen thousand yen. As to what I figured out…” Yusuke pulled the tie off his head, wrapping it around his land loosely before stuffing the bundle back into his school bag. He then made a humming sound as he thought, leaning against the wall of the building as he nodded companionably to the man in line in front of him. “Humanity is humanity, and a person is a person. There is sublime beauty in the gentle caress of a lover’s hand, and unaccountable cruelty in the strike of a murderer’s knife, in the same way there is beauty in a chorus’s paean, and cruelty in an army at war.” He gave her a lukewarm smile. “Clearly, I’m still struggling. But that is probably humanity as well.”

“Right.” Futaba sighed, and stared at the ends of her hair as she twisted a bundle of strands in her hand. She was going to need to trim her split ends soon. “Cool. Right. So… I’m gonna be right back.”

She stared at the prepared foods section in the nearly 7-Eleven, trying to decide between a hot dog bun and a tuna onigiri. Ryuji said to take it day by day. Ann said to relax, and Akira said to challenge herself. Yusuke said to keep thinking— or that was what she thought he meant, anyway. He was pretty much always frustratingly abstract, but that was fine, because she herself was probably usually too concrete. 

In the end she put both the bun and the onigiri in her shopping basket, along with two bottles of unsweetened green tea and a packet of shrimp-flavored potato sticks. When she got back to the slowly growing line outside the electronics store Yusuke was already glued to his sketchbook, and jumped in surprise when she dropped the shopping bag on the ground at his feet. 

“I don’t like this,” she said firmly, as he looked up. 

“‘This’?” he echoed, blinking.

“A problem I can’t solve. So I’m going to solve it.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Are you referring to the state of your relationship with other human beings as you begin to reconnect with society at large?”

“Yep. Don’t like it. Gonna fix it.”

Yusuke knelt to retrieve the bag and peeked inside it, a brief gleam passing through his eyes. He went for the potato sticks first, tilting the container towards her after opening it; Futaba shook her head, and he reached in and took one for himself.

“I have faith in you,” he said, before disappearing the potato stick in a way that reminded her of a particularly focused rabbit. “Anyway, thank you. As expected of the team navigator… somehow you knew I had neglected to pack anything to eat.”

“I think anyone with a pulse could figure that one out.” She paused, biting her lip. “You really have faith in me? Just like that?”

“Of course,” he said mildly, as if surprised she would question it. “Haven’t you done more difficult things than that already? Now that you’ve started, you seem only to gain momentum.”

“Like a semi-truck full of logs rolling down a mountain.”

“I… suppose?”

“Can’t stop or it’ll be some Final Destination mess. Shattered glass everywhere. People screaming. A lone woman standing in the chaos, forever scarred by what she saw. Then, suddenly, she’s ten minutes earlier, waiting at a stoplight…”

“I sincerely worry about you some days.”


	4. Thursday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> good news according to my friends the covid vaccine has made me 20% funner. not any faster at writing though unfortunately

“Hey, Sakura-san? Um…” 

Minami hesitantly tucked her hair behind her ear. Futaba paused in the middle of digging for her lunchbox in her schoolbag, looking up warily. 

“That guy you’ve been hanging out with? Kitagawa-sempai? Hey, just so you know, I heard that yesterday he missed dorm curfew,” she whispered. “He got caught trying to come back in at six in the morning. I heard that it’s not the first time, either… he could be mixed up in some shady stuff.” Minami was leaning in and dropping her voice down to a whisper. Futaba leaned back out of reflex, and struggled to keep a grin off her face. Was she right, or was she right? Less than a week, and Yusuke already had freshmen gossiping about him. “Be careful, okay? It’s trouble, getting mixed up with the wrong kind of guy.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” the girl at the desk next to them piped up, winding her ponytail around her finger. “My brother, in third year? He says that tall guy’s nuts. He’s seen him talking to himself out by the ornamental pond, like, a lot. It’s kinda scary, right?”

“He’s harmless. Just a weirdo,” Futaba said dismissively as she stood up, the impulse to grin fading. Really, if she was being honest, it wasn’t very funny at all. Sure, _she_ could call Yusuke all kinds of names and tease him all she wanted. She’d earned it, and besides, it wasn’t serious. It was verbal sparring, not bullying, and Yusuke gave as good as he got where she was concerned. Where did these girls get off spreading rumors?

Ponytail girl shook her head. “ _And_ my brother says he was always showing up last year with bruises and bandages and stuff. You think he’s in a gang?”

Futaba pressed her lips together and walked off without responding. She thought Minami might have been saying something, but it was lost in the angry buzz in her ears. Just like Yusuke, not to come up with a good cover story. They’d all gotten pretty banged up in the cognitive world, and every now and again, it would carry over, a wallop by a shadow coming up as an ugly bruise the next morning in the real world. The injuries usually healed much quicker than ones inflicted in reality, as if the brain was embarrassed about its mistake. 

(Makoto had insisted it shouldn’t work like that, that the cognitive world was by definition not real, but it made perfect sense to Futaba. She’d spent a few years in late elementary school doing homework after school in her mother’s office, when she was too old for daycare and too young to be left alone at home for hours. Sometimes she was able to badger the lab techs into explaining their projects to her. At one point the Isshiki lab had been delving into phantom limb pain, and the ability of the brain to feel impossible sensations. One particularly cocky grad student had even gotten deep into some cutting-edge paper with her about the neuronal fundamentals of meta-awareness of the self, apparently believing that if he could explain something to an eight year old, it indicated his superior grasp of the subject matter. Whether his grasp truly was superior or Futaba was an unusually precocious eight year old, the idea had burrowed its way inside her head and taken root. If using a mirror to simulate an amputated leg relieved pain, why couldn’t the sight of a monster biting your cognition of a leg create it?)

Ann usually covered her bruises with makeup, while Makoto explained hers away as aikido injuries. It wasn’t surprising that Yusuke would have made no attempt to camouflage his, but it was frustrating. How could he be so careless, drawing attention to himself like that? For such a smart person, he could be a real moron sometimes. 

She stopped at the bottom of the staircase she had been stomping down, and took a deep breath. 

It didn’t make sense, to be mad at Yusuke. So what was she really mad about?

She continued down the hallway, making a conscious effort to walk at a slow, measured pace, helping her slow her thoughts down to a slow, measured rate. 

Ah. That was it.

After her mother had died, she’d gotten more and more withdrawn at school— not that she was ever very social to begin with. And then when she’d moved in with her uncle, she’d gotten thinner and thinner— not that she’d had very much weight to lose. And her hair would be greasy until gym class when she could finally take a shower, and she’d gotten in trouble for not paying her lunch fees, and she would fall asleep in class almost every day, and in all that time, _nobody had ever asked her what was wrong_. 

How do you see your classmate, even one you don’t know or don’t like, start looking so haggard, and not even wonder?

How do you see your classmate, even one you think is weird and off-putting, come to school with bruises, and do nothing but spread rumors? 

Schools were all the same, after all. 

“But I’m not,” she said aloud as she exited the exterior door to the school garden, startling a teacher hiding behind the door for a surreptitious smoke. She spotted Yusuke in the distance, next to the ornamental pond, looking down at the water. He’d wanted to show her something during lunch period, but whatever it was could probably wait. Besides, she’d forgotten her lunchbox in her haste to leave the classroom, and she wasn’t too hungry, anyway. 

She texted him to tell him she had something to do and would see him after school. Then she switched text windows to message Akira.

**FUTABA.** i solved misdirected emotions that were causing me anxiety all by myself

 **FUTABA.** i want a treat

She slipped her phone back into her pocket, then whirled around on her heels, yanking the door back open and startling the teacher again.

Time to get to work. 

———

“Excuse me, but I’m a first year, and I’m kind of lost, which way is the gym?”

…Is what she meant to say. What came out was a stuttering mess.

“I-I’m. Which way? Lost? Gym?”

Futaba squeezed her eyes together and let out a huff of air, before opening one eye carefully. The girl she’d approached, a tall girl with a student council armband and a third-year pin on her collar, blinked at her. 

“The gym? It’s across the courtyard. Do you need me to show you?”

Futaba followed the girl’s pointing finger out the window, and feigned surprise. “There’s a student in that pond!”

“Oh. Yeah, him,” the girl said with a sigh. “Try to ignore him. He’s… you’re a first year, right? Don’t worry about it too much.”

“Is he dangerous?” Futaba said, making her eyes widen. 

“No, no. Well… probably not. Maybe? He’s supposedly a prodigy, but I heard from a friend in the fine arts course he stalked this girl from another school. If you want my opinion…”

By the time lunch period was over, Futaba had a solid idea of the scale of the rumors Yusuke had accumulated in two years at Kosei. He was in a gang, or being extorted by one, or worked at a Shinjuku club despite being underage; he was a playboy who’d gotten dozens of chocolates on Valentines day every year, but had rejected a classmate so rudely he’d made her cry; his family had kicked him out because he’d done something terrible, or they’d died in an accident and he was the only survivor, which was why he talked to himself and looked around so strangely sometimes. He was talking to their spirits, a lofty third year explained with what Futaba thought was an unnecessary level of excitement. 

She spent the rest of the afternoon grumpy and snappish, largely ignoring her teachers and sitting at her desk with hunched shoulders. Forget about the stupid donation scandal, these people didn’t deserve her help. Might as well delete the intranet backdoor she’d installed on her homeroom teacher’s laptop via a clandestine phishing email entirely. Or wait, wasn’t it less hoity-toity kids who’d benefit from her digging up dirt on people who could buy their way into anything they wanted? Okay then, she’d double time it. If she really buckled down, she could get it sorted out and anonymously sent to the evening news by next weekend. Although now that she thought about it, being on scholarship didn’t mean you couldn’t be a jerk. What a choice. Well, she’d make a pros and cons list as to who she wanted to aggravate more—

She jumped in her seat as the teacher called her name, banging her knees on the bottom of her desk with a yelp. 

“What?” She heard some giggles from across the classroom, but seriously wasn’t in the right headspace to evaluate whether they were amused or mocking. “Um. Sorry, what was the question?”

The teacher, a no-nonsense woman in her forties, gestured to the board, eyebrows raised. “Problem five, Sakura.”

Futaba ran her eyes across the numbers quickly. “X is… six. Um, actually, can I go to the nurse? I don’t feel well…” 

The teacher glanced up at the clock on the wall, then beckoned to Futaba. She stood, dropping her notebook as she tried to stuff it in her bag too quickly, face reddening. “There’s only half an hour left of last period,” the woman said in a quieter voice, waving a hand at the rest of the class to indicate they should keep on with the practice problems as Futaba came to the front of the room. “I’ll write you a pass to leave early, unless you need to rest before the train? No? You look pale… well, all right,” she said, as Futaba felt newfound appreciation for the fact that her complexion had naturally anemic undertones. “Oh, and Sakura? I won’t write you another demerit today, but if you don’t dye your hair back to a natural color by Saturday, I’ll have to call home and talk to your parents.”

Futaba ducked her head mulishly in acknowledgment and left the classroom, bypassing the nurse’s office and wandering in the direction of the third years’ hall instead. Even with a pass, she didn’t feel like being interrogated, so hid in the girls’ bathroom closest to Yusuke’s homeroom killing time on her phone until the last bell rang. 

She heard the chatter of the crowd in the hallway as students left their classes, then closer footsteps as someone walked into the tiled bathroom. She backed into a stall automatically, because even though it wasn’t technically illegal for her to be in this particular bathroom, it sure felt like it should be. 

“Futaba? I got your text—“

She burst out of the stall with a shout, hands outstretched and ready to grab Yusuke. He looked flummoxed by her reaction, even as she gripped onto his arms and frog-marched him back to the bathroom’s main door. 

“I didn’t mean come _in_ to the bathroom, I meant meet me _outside_ , this is the girls’—“

She froze, staring at the privacy wall as she heard the main bathroom door swing open and two loudly chatting girls walk in. In one smooth movement driven purely by complete and utter terror, she shoved Yusuke to the left; the stall door banged loudly as she followed on his heels and threw her arm back behind her to latch the door. She had the brief thought that “if someone investigates the commotion, looks under the door, and sees two pairs of legs, at best they’ll heckle and at worst they’ll snitch to a teacher, so I’d better do something about that,” but it was pronounced as a silent “AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”, and had her slipping around Yusuke, jumping up unsteadily onto the seat of the toilet, and yanking his arm like she was trying to dislocate it until he joined her up on her precarious perch. 

“So I applied, right? But the store owner, he was all like, oh, it’ll be so refreshing to have a young high school girl here…”

“Ew, that’s nasty. You didn’t take the job, right?”

A brief and nearly silent emergency, quiet enough to go unheard over the chatter of the two girls at the mirrors, ensued as Futaba’s right foot slipped sideways off the slanted toilet seat and unbalanced her. She grabbed at Yusuke’s shirt, and he in turn slammed his open-palmed hand against the back wall to keep them both from going over. 

“Knowing him doesn’t make it any less creepy.”

“I don’t know him, my _parents_ know him.”

“That’s way worse.”

Yusuke put his free arm around Futaba’s back to help steady her, which felt sort of like an adenosine blowdart right to the heart, or a fun little trip of the circuit breaker— she abruptly straightened her left leg and whipped her right foot back up to the toilet seat, so quickly she forgot to check her position and kicked Yusuke squarely in the ankle, sending _his_ foot splashing into the toilet bowl— it was luckily covered by the sound of the faucet, but Futaba saw Yusuke opening his mouth to react and shoved her hand squarely over it, eyes as wide and warning as she could possibly make them—

“Not a cafe, I’m allergic to dairy. I can’t work where I’d be touching it all the time.”

“Like, how allergic? I mean, it’s not aerosolized…”

“Sure it is. Milk foamers.”

“But like, _allergic_ allergic?”

Futaba thought: whoever designed toilets that are slanted slightly forward for ergonomics should be taken out back and shot. Futaba thought: I cannot believe that Yusuke is going along with this for even one single second instead of damning the torpedos and bursting out the door. Futaba thought: feeling someone’s hot breath on your hand is objectively gross, but _apparently_ I am so far gone it’s making me dizzy. Futaba thought: _does_ making a latte aerosolize milk? Futaba thought: what is he looking at? Why is he twisting his neck like— is he reading the graffiti? Is he standing here _right_ up in my business, one foot in the toilet water, reading the _graffiti_? 

“No, you stab it right through your clothes.”

“Even jeans?”

“I think so? I’ve never been wearing jeans when…”

The footsteps receded, the main door shut with a muted slam, and Futaba slumped back against the wall of the toilet stall like a wrung-out washcloth. Yusuke stood up to his full height, rolling his neck and shoulders in a full circle before elegantly stepping down to the floor.

“An inelegant place for an embrace,” he commented, looking at his soaked shoe with regret.

“Priorities!” Futaba squawked as he knelt down to remove it, too rattled to come up with a comeback to that one. “Can we please— we need to go! Leave! Move move move! Urgency, people!”

It wasn’t until they were halfway down the hallway and turning onto the staircase that Futaba slowed down from her awkward jog-walk, the need for speed and the need not to draw attention warring in her mind. “Honestly. What would you do without me? What would you have done if you’d gotten caught?”

Yusuke looked slightly offended at the question. “If you had been clearer, I wouldn’t have been in there in the first place.”

“No, really. What would you have done?” Futaba slowed to a stop just after they left the staircase and crossed the hall, to the top of the elegant main stairs that descended through the school’s atrium. She looked at her feet, right on the line between linoleum and the decorative slightly frosted glass of the main stairway, and shuffled her feet until her toes were exactly even with each other. “Probably nothing. Probably would have just nodded at those girls and left.”

“I don’t see how it matters what—“

“And the _stairs_!” Futaba exploded, waving her hands at the staircase descending in front of them, her voice echoing in the mostly-empty atrium— most students had by now either made it to their clubs or fled campus to go home. “What were you saying about the stairs this morning?”

“Futaba, what—“ 

“Say it again!”

Yusuke jutted his chin out, clearly not quite understanding what was going on, and already gearing up to go on the defensive. “I said that I wished to lie under them and draw the reflections of the morning light from the glass dome, an idea that if I _recall_ , irritated you for no good reason. You wouldn’t even let me stop and get a preliminary sketch down.”

“It’s obvious!” Futaba snapped, stomping a couple of steps away and whirling around. “They’re glass, you moron! Girls wear uniform skirts! You lie under there and everyone will think you’re some kind of pervert!” She viciously flipped her skirt hem up to punctuate her point, exposing the terrycloth shorts she wore underneath as a defense against exactly that sort of thing, then dropped into a knees-together squat, covered her face with her hands, and let a muffled scream of frustration out into her palms. 

Her hands had accidentally knocked her glasses down onto the floor, and Yusuke’s voice clinked like ice as he knelt to retrieve them. “I don’t recall asking for insults to my character. You knew who I was when you—“

“I want to do that too!” Futaba blurted out, uncovering her face, eyes wide with fear at the realization that she’d misspoke _again_ , been misinterpreted _again_ , and unwilling to let Yusuke think for one more second that there was a part of him she didn’t like. His face was too blurry to see his expression, and although she could see the blackish line of her glasses in his hands, she didn’t reach for them. “I don’t want to— to _care_ so much! I’m always watching to see what people think of me, always! And I see you just doing what you want, and it always turns out well, and, and you just let everything roll off of you, and you don’t care how weird you look! And I wish I could do that too, instead of always feeling like I’m suffocating!”

She swallowed convulsively, rubbing the back of her hand against her eyes. Then she took a deep breath, not sure what she was going to say next, but she had a good rhythm going and there was probably a lot more emotional breakdown to get out if she looked for it. But then the world came back into focus as Yusuke slipped her glasses back on her face, which broke her stride enough to let her notice that he no longer looked annoyed. 

“My apologies for my kneejerk reaction,” he said, his mouth twisting. Futaba shook her head fervently, pushing her glasses up with one finger to adjust them.

“It sounded like I was insulting you big time,” she admitted. “It’s not really how I meant to say it, it just… came out. So I’m sorry too.” The knot in her stomach untwisted as Yusuke stood up, pulling her up with him by the hand. He let her hand go and tugged the hem of her skirt down to hang evenly, then brushed some speck of dust off of it; the fussy gesture brought a tremulous smile to her face. 

“Still. When you’re having such a difficult time, I shouldn’t add to your stress—“

“Telling me when I’m being a dingus doesn’t count as adding to my stress,” she shot back, poking him in the chest with a finger. “So forget about it. We both have some spaghetti code that’s hard to detangle, right?”

She saw several thoughts flicker over his face, as clear to her as one of Prometheus’s readouts, and snorted.

“It’s a programming term that means totally disorganized, inscrutable code. But yes, we can go get noodles. There’s a yakisoba place near the station, right? Let’s mosey.”

Yusuke fell into step beside her as they walked down the glass stairs, subject of so much trouble. Futaba wondered if whoever designed them had thought about the skirt problem, or the fact that glass became slippery when it rained and a thousand pairs of feet tracked in the puddles from outside. Form over function, that was where people went wrong. “I’ll treat you,” Yusuke offered, and it was such an unlikely thing for him to say that Futaba stopped and stared at him for a moment before hopping down the steps quickly to catch up.

“With what money?”

“I can spare it, from what I earned yesterday. It will mean I can only afford five tubes of oil paint instead of six, but I suppose I don’t need both cadmium red _and_ napthol red.”

“That’s probably the nicest offer anyone has ever made me,” Futaba said, and knowing what she did about Yusuke, it wasn’t really a joke. She shook her head, though. “Don’t worry about it. I get allowance, remember?” 

“That’s not the point,” Yusuke protested. Eventually, as they hashed it out on their way down the street, they settled on paying for each other. 

“I can’t believe they don’t give you a stipend for art supplies, though,” Futaba said, frowning at the gathering clouds in the sky as they entered the yakisoba restaurant. “Aren’t you on a scholarship? It’s kinda unfair that they expect you to shell out for materials.”

“I get access to the supplies the art department provides,” Yusuke sniffed, “but they’re hardly sufficient for more than a quick study not meant for display. The quality of oil paints is an extremely personal preference, and while the school provides _student-grade_ materials, I fail to see how I can truly improve my craft while using materials my technique outgrew at the age of nine.”

“Snob,” Futaba said cheerfully, as she pecked at the machine to order. 

Once settled in a booth, bowls of steaming noodles in front of them both (pork with extra onion for Yusuke, Okinawa-style for Futaba), Futaba haltingly began to explain. About the rumors she’d uncovered, about what her classmates had said. Yusuke seemed faintly surprised at the effort she’d put in.

“It’s like when you have an ingrown hair that you just keep picking at,” Futaba explained. “I couldn’t just let it _go_.”

“Disgusting.” Yusuke put an extra-large mouthful of noodles into his mouth and chewed them thoroughly, still looking like he had something to say. Futaba waited impatiently. “I knew I wasn’t well-liked, but the content of some of those rumors is impressive. Surely there must be a way to turn being a rumored ghost whisperer to my advantage.”

Futaba stretched her arms out. “Let’s start a ghost-hunting Youtube channel. Pull in the big sponsorship bucks. You’ll never run out of cadmium again.” 

“A dream I hold fondly in my heart,” Yusuke said serenely. He put his chopsticks down, then, looking at her directly. “Did it help?”

Futaba sighed as she folded her paper chopstick wrapper into an accordion. Somehow she always thought better when her hands were moving. “I… don’t know. It made me frustrated, and it made me mad. And it made me think that people are all the same, and schools are all the same, and it’s like fitting a square peg into a round hole to have to be there for the next three years. But… I don’t feel like giving up. Not yet. I kinda thought that I’d have already dropped out by now. But it’s not a kind of mad that makes me want to back off. It’s a kind of mad that makes me want to fight someone.”

Yusuke had taken out a pen and was making notes on his napkin. “The ghosts. The dead family… the gangs. Shinjuku. I’m forgetting a few of them…” 

Futaba blinked, then shrugged. “You stalked a girl. Which actually, you did, by the way, so should we even count it? Um… oh yeah, that one guy said…”

Once Yusuke apparently felt he had a complete list, he looked at the napkin for a moment, then up at Futaba. “Do you realize that you talked, unprompted, to fourteen strangers today?”

Futaba stared at him.

Outside, the rain promised by the gathering clouds began to gently fall. In the way of spring rain, it was warm, and spread the scent of growing things throughout the city.

————

Remembering her teacher’s comment as she dried her hands on the towel next to the bathroom sink at home, Futaba peered at her hair in the mirror. She parted it on the side, flipping one section over her crown and tilting her head to check her roots. Not quite hungry for a bleaching, but long enough that she could touch it up without burning her scalp. How _would_ she look with dark hair? Long black hair was coming back into fashion, according to Ann’s magazines, and her hair had always been vigorously glossy even with the torture she put it through. It would probably look nice.

She tried that thought out in her head, moving it about suspiciously like a bite of a new food she wasn’t sure she liked, then swept her hair back into its normal position. 

Nah. She fundamentally had no interest in looking nice. She was instead invested in looking a way she liked, which was completely different.

Three hours later, after the restaurant was closed for the night, she was sitting on the floor in front of Sojiro while he bleached the tricky part in the back of her head she could never reach. Or rather, she could reach it with the help of a long brush, two mirrors, a lot of clips, and dislocating her shoulders, but this was generally nicer in every way.

“Hey, Sojiro. I forgot. I need you to write me a note.”

“I told you, I’m not claiming you have a heart condition to get you out of gym. Suffering through gym class builds character.” He moved on to another section of her hair, pinning the first one up and out of the way.

She blew out sharply, blowing a stray piece of hair away from tickling her nose. “Not that. I’ve been getting demerits for having dyed hair, so I need you to tell my homeroom teacher it’s natural.”

Sojiro gave a half-sigh, half-grumble behind her. “Futaba, nobody is going to believe that.”

“It _could_ be natural. Human beings can naturally have orange hair.”

“It’s your responsibility to follow the rules. It’s just part of going to school, or working in a company. You think dress codes are strict at your age, try wearing a full suit to the office all summer. Come to think of it, I’m surprised you weren’t made to dye it back to black in middle school.”

He hadn’t stopped brushing the bleach onto her roots, though, and Futaba grinned. She knew perfectly well that while Sojiro pretended to be a stick in the mud, he was bound to give in in the end.

“They tried. Mom called them up and told them my dad was foreign and I was trying to connect with his culture. They couldn’t prove her wrong, and she made a super huge fuss until they let it go.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised. Wakaba always did have a low tolerance for pointless rules. Rules she saw as pointless, anyway,” he amended, before she could jump on his slip of the tongue. 

That little part of Futaba that was always watching herself perked up, then settled down. Gone were the days where even hearing her mother’s name would leave her unable to eat for the rest of the day. Maybe someday even that part of her that was constantly watching for a relapse would disappear, too. 

She stretched, linking her fingers together and pushing her arms in front of her. “I’m counting on you to make a fuss. I know you have it in you. How much more?”

“About a third.” There was a hesitation in the air, a slight increase in the stiffness of his hands as he parted another section of her hair. When faced with strangers or acquaintances, Futaba was often unsure how to read their more subtle mannerisms, often defaulting even these days to the slight paranoia of assuming they were laughing at her behind their hands. With her closest confidants, though, she was so used to the way they moved and spoke that it was as if Prometheus was hovering around her, displaying an easily-digestible readout. 

“Spit it out, old man.”

“Spit what out?”

“Well, I dunno yet! You haven’t spat it!”

Sojiro sighed. Futaba couldn’t see him, but she could imagine the wrinkles in his forehead.

“Well, I was just… thinking. You never bring it up, so I hadn’t mentioned it. I wish I had something to tell you. About your father, or… well. You must have been curious. But—“

“Nope.”

“I don’t have— what?”

“Nope, I said.” Sojiro was silent behind her, wind taken out of his sails. Futaba pushed her glasses up her nose, grinning slightly. “I’m not curious. Used to it. Never really worried about it much. If Mom never had anything to say about it, then there’s nothing to say.”

Sojiro half-sighed, half-chuckled behind her. “Futaba…”

“Besides,” she continued, because some things were easy to say, as long as you didn’t have to look at someone while you were saying them. “ _Obviously_ I know who my dad is. He runs a coffee shop in Yongenjaya, and he makes a mean curry, and he’s usually not as grumpy as he pretends to be. And he’s gonna write me a note so I can keep my cool hair, too,” she added, to keep things from getting too sappy.

“We’ll see.” But she knew that was a win, and grinned. Sojiro continued, sounding like he was expecting the worst but hoping for the best. “Beside the hair, how is… is school going well?”

It was the same awkward question he’d asked every evening, sounding more like a distant friend of your parents unsure what else to talk about when unexpectedly asked to make conversation. But Futaba understood, and forgave him for it. You couldn’t blame a man who was deeply afraid of stepping on a landmine. Monday it had been “Medium well. Can we have steak for dinner?”, Tuesday it had been “They hired me, I’m a teacher now,” and Wednesday had been a wordless groan. Today, she stared off into the middle distance for a bit, wondering if it was okay to commit to the answer she was going to give.

“I’m… okay,” she said slowly. “I’m doing okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> The bones of this fic are pretty well laid down, I just need to fill in the gaps. Each chapter is about half written already. Writing with an ending in mind is surreal


End file.
